Learning to teach a sensitive subject

Educators across the country are increasingly addressing genocide

Freshmen at Rancho Buena Vista High School have four days dedicated to Rwanda in world history class; some of the students even belong to an Invisible Children Club, which raises awareness about child victims of war in Africa.

An after-school theater program brings the Holocaust to the stage in Otay Mesa next week after years of performing lighter fare.

Last June, the end-of-the-year humanities project for High Tech High's 10th-graders involved spending the night on the lawn of the Point Loma campus in a tent village called Camp Darfur.

Genocide is a hot topic in local classrooms. Educators nationwide are giving it more attention, as evidenced by the schedule for this weekend's annual conference of the National Council for the Social Studies in downtown San Diego.

The 4,000 teachers expected to attend can choose from workshops such as “Teaching Genocide and Human Rights for the 21st Century” and “Despair, Death, and Denial: The Armenian and Pontian Greek Genocides.”

The prevalence of teaching about ghastly episodes in Germany, Bosnia, Sudan and other places reflects an increasingly global outlook in the teaching of social studies, educators say.

Growing awareness about the conflict in Darfur and the recent congressional debate about an Armenian genocide resolution bring relevancy to the topic in the classroom.

“How to teach about genocide is still a very new concept,” said Sara Cohan, education director for the San Francisco-based Genocide Education Project. The organization specializes in the Armenian genocide, which the state Board of Education has said all 10th-graders should learn about in social studies.

The development of training seminars and instructional materials by human rights groups has given teachers guidance on how to talk with teenagers about mass killings.

“It's sometimes hard to come out of class smiling when I'm teaching because it seems like we've had evil empire after evil empire,” said Ellen Bergan, a history teacher at Morse High School in San Diego's Bay Terraces neighborhood.

Bergan and other educators say they work through it by taking a solution-oriented approach to teaching genocide.

“I see it as kind of the whole purpose of education,” Bergan said. “This is your world. These people are living in your world, and what are you going to do about it?”

San Diego Jewish Academy students Jennifer Popp and Michael Shoemaker formed a Darfur Action Committee on their La Jolla campus after learning about that conflict in their Judaic studies class. Morse student Jon Yturralde visited Uganda last summer and organized a schoolwide “Week of Consciousness” last month to raise awareness of international crises.

Students in the extended program at the Centers of Learning by the Sea in Otay Mesa will present a Holocaust play for hundreds of South County students next week.

Jazmine Damian, 15, a sophomore performing in the play, said it's important to learn about the Holocaust because genocide can occur again.

“I feel like in certain places it could because people aren't informed,” Jazmine said.

A visit to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., in the late 1990s inspired drama teacher Sam Teres to have his seventh-through 12th-grade students tackle the difficult material. He said part of the lesson for his students is that in contrast to the comedies and fantasies they have performed, they have the responsibility of portraying real people.